Truly A Season To Sneeze About

In The Midst Of The Worst Hay Fever Season In Recent Memory, Some Persist In An Effort To Breathe Easier.

A horticulturist by trade, John Beaudry held forth like a community visionary as he described how planting shrubs and bulbs along a scraggly North Side stretch of railroad will breathe new vigor into the Norwood Park neighborhood.

"People are reclaiming their neighborhoods from crime and from gangs," he intoned on a hazy Wednesday afternoon near Harlem and Avondale Avenues.

Beaudry paused to survey the tangle of weeds and bushes that he aims to replace before continuing with no less ferocity, "People are reclaiming their neighborhoods from ragweed."

As one of an estimated 30 million American allergy sufferers, Beaudry spoke from the heart, voicing the unspoken appeal of all those in Chicago stricken this summer in what is shaping up to be the worst hay fever season in recent memory.

This year's severity, allergists and plant experts say, is a result of several factors--most importantly, weather.

Nurtured through a damp spring, and then parched by an unusually dry summer, ragweed pollen has taken flight in breathtaking quantities, clogging noses and rasping throats throughout the city and suburbs.

"All these plants are spewing billions and billions of pollen grains," said Michael Dillon, curator of vascular plants at the Field Museum.

While the answer for many sufferers is medicinal--antihistamines, decongestants and other elixirs--for others, the key is prevention, eliminating that most wretched of weeds to lessen the impact of future summers.

"These are the good plants," Beaudry explained of the hundreds of asters, coreopsis, sedum and other perennials that he and Norwood Park/Edison Park House and Garden have planned for Norwood Park. "We are putting in ones that will make the place look better, and make people feel better."

That's exactly what sufferers are seeking from allergists like Dr. Suellyn Rossman of Des Plaines, who reports that this year's crop of patients are complaining more than ever.

Not only are patients suffering more this year, but they are seeking help earlier than ever, according to Dr. Joseph Leija, a suburban allergist who has tracked pollen counts for the past three years.

"Usually it hits about mid-August, but people were complaining in late July," Leija said.

Tracking the pollen count with a rooftop machine at his Melrose Park office, Leija calculates the quantity of micro-pollen grains circulating in the air.

If trends continue for the rest of the summer, he said, average pollen counts in 1999 could reach as high as 140 grains per cubic meter of air, far ahead of the averages for 1998 and 1997--high pollen years themselves.

While the effects are easy to see, from droves of glassy-eyed sufferers to pharmacists seeing a brisk business in allergy relievers, the causes are often less clear.

Aside from the weather, experts say, allergy seasons are influenced by several factors, including pollution, which may irritate the sinuses and aggravate symptoms.

At the same time, pollution may actually dampen the effects of some allergens because, as Leija noted, "With pollutants in the air, the pollen cannot fly."

This fact, Leija said, is one reason pollen counts these days are--surprisingly--less than they were several decades ago.

Indeed, though this season has floored many hay fever sufferers, it is far less severe than those from earlier this century, before a developed suburban landscape helped block the path of airborne pollen.

In the mid-1950s, for instance, a less-developed suburban landscape allowed ragweed's flying grains to float freely across open lands, Leija said.

"In those days, we'd have a pollen count of 500 and 1,000," he said. "Nowadays we have it around 100, 150, 210."

That historical caveat comes as little consolation to sufferers like Beaudry, who, as a project coordinator for the city's Department of Environment, spends much of his time outdoors, waging a perennial battle with pollen.

Thus, it is a source of some satisfaction, he says, to know that the Norwood Park project, as well as the other 500 or so greening projects that the city's GreenCorps Chicago program has performed over the past five years, may offer some relief to allergy sufferers.

"People call it beautification, but it's so much more than that," Beaudry said. "It's the air you breathe, it's how you feel about your neighborhood."

On Wednesday, as Beaudry and garden club President Pauline Boyle helped their team of amateur gardeners prepare the topsoil for a row of new non-allergenic plants, an unmistakable sound could be heard even above the roar of Harlem Avenue: a sneeze.

Standing at a bus stop on the far side of the street, Scott Castillo barked a second and then a third sneeze into a fistful of handkerchiefs.